


You're My Only Hope

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 4x06 spoilers, Coda Challenge, F/M, This is a weird one to tag, a bit of angst but not a great deal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 18:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8456950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which Fitz learns how Jemma ranks The Worst Things That Ever Happened To Us.(A post-4x06 speculation)





	

Finally too frustrated to bear it any longer, Jemma banished the poor excuses for lab techs from the room with a sharp word and locked the door behind them, using the back of her wrist to brush her hair from her face. Bad enough she had been black-bagged and whisked away to yet another undisclosed underground location without a change of pants or a phone call; the resources at her disposal, both equipment and personnel, only added insult to injury. Why the government wanted her specifically had become instantly clear, but apart from the required clearance she could have done the work just as well at home with Fitz.

 

Lord, she wished he was here.

 

Anxious about the lie detector test and still a little stung about AIDA, she hadn’t said goodbye before he left and they had been too busy to talk since—and then the thick-necked goons had confiscated her phone and removed the battery. She regretted that now. With her away who knew how long he would worry beyond his usual levels, no doubt thinking her silence signified continued anger. Which it didn’t. She should have known better than to let him go without saying everything that needed to be said; assuming there would be enough time later often resulted in nothing being said at all. They had done that far too many times already. Pressing the heels of her hands to her eyebrows, she spoke aloud. “I’m sorry, Fitz. Please be careful. I love you.” 

 

“Jemma?”

 

Her heart made an illogical leap, only to return to earth with a thud as she realized the sound originated somewhere in the room behind her, not on the other side of the door as it would if SHIELD had decided to send him. “I need to get more sleep, Fitz,” she muttered, closing her eyes and resting her forehead against the doorframe.

 

“Yeah, no argument there—setting the alarm a half-hour later won’t end the world.”

 

In all the thousands of times she had spoken to Fitz without his presence, she had never heard him respond audibly; even dehydrated, exhausted, and hours from death, she remained fully aware that his voice in her head was just that. Whirling, she opened her eyes to find him hovering by a lab bench _—actually_  hovering, his shoes four inches off the ground, his thumb twisting into his palm and wary hopefulness in his green-cast face. A hologram. Not his best work, she acknowledged, but then she wouldn’t be surprised if the connection had a difficult time stabilizing through the air-tight security surrounding the network. Her earlier, pitiful hacking attempts only proved her skills sadly lacking. “Fitz,” she gasped, moving towards him, “if they catch you in the system you’ll be court-martialed. Don’t you dare get yourself fired after I’ve managed to dodge it.”

 

Relief spread through his body from forehead to shoulders to hands, and he bent in half as though he’d been running and needed to catch his breath. “You can hear me?”

 

“And see you, though you’re a bit green.”

 

He straightened, expelling a slow sigh as he looked around the room. “That’s something then. I’m not a hallucination, I swear.”

 

“Why would I assume you’re a hallucination? I’m not that tired.

 

Despite the funny color of his skin, she could see his eyes darken. “Never mind. Tell you later. Where are we?”

 

She shrugged. “An underground government facility of some sort. They black-bagged me to get here. You’re hacking it; don’t you know?”

 

“Er, well, I’m not hacking it.”

 

“What do you mean? Is it”—she lowered her voice, looking at the suspected security camera in the corner of the room—“Skye?”

 

“No, it’s—Jemma—”

 

He refused to meet her eyes as he hunted for the words, pinching the bridge of his nose and weighing his options until he could find the gentlest way to say it. An icy cold lump appeared in her chest and froze her alveoli one by one until she could barely breathe. “Fitz. Just tell me.”

 

“It’s not the sort of thing you just tell someone.”

 

“Fitz!”

 

Taking a deep breath, he squared his shoulders and their gazes with a clench of his jaw. “The thing is, I think I’m in another dimension.”

 

What little breath she had evaporated as her stomach dropped away, like when she fell from the Bus, like when she flung out onto Maveth. Not again.  _Not again_.  _Why_  did this keep happening to them? A moment of happiness, something done badly or not at all, and then an impossible event that ended in months of separation and pain. Everything had been going so  _well_ , she foolishly thought they had broken their pattern by refusing to let it assert itself—well, so much for human willpower over the vagaries of life.

 

No.

 

She stopped herself immediately. She did not believe in Fitz’s anthropomorphic cosmos and only theoretically believed in inevitability. Bodies might be acted on by gravity, but people directed their own paths, and she and Fitz had already decided theirs:  _we won’t let it_. “Tell me what happened,” she said, setting her jaw.

 

He explained as quickly as possible: the ghost hunt, Roxxon, the fluctuating readings, the flash of light. “And then we were here, wherever it is: me, Ghost Rider, and Coulson. The team thinks we’ve vanished into thin air, only you and I know that’s not possible because of—”

 

“The first law of Thermodynamics,” she chimed in, and his face softened.

 

“And, you know, I’m still here. Talking to you.”

 

“How, Fitz?”

 

“Well—” He scratched at his cheek. “I don’t know, exactly. We can see them, but they can’t see us—at least, they might see something, but they’re not trusting it. We’ve been trying for a few hours. I don’t know, I just thought, maybe if I could get to you—and somehow the thinking made me appear here.”

 

“If you’re in a different dimension,” she said thoughtfully, “there’s no reason for it to behave according to our understanding of space-time.”

 

“That’s actually—” He stopped and shook his head, putting one hand on the back of his neck. “So. Bit fairy story, I know, but it appears to have worked, at least.”

 

“Goes with our curse.”

 

As she anticipated, he threw his head back and rolled his eyes. “Jemma, really, you’re going to mock me about that when we’re  _literally_ in two different—”

 

“I’ll mock you about it the rest of our—”

 

“—think you might be willing to acknowledge the facts—”

 

“—because you’re acknowledging all of them yourself—”

 

“—this is a pretty bad situation.”

 

“I disagree,” she said, steady as Gibraltar. “This isn’t even in the top five of bad things that have happened to us.”

 

He stopped to stare at her incredulously. “You keep a list?”

 

Of course she had a list. How long had he known her? Giving him an eyeroll of her own, she spread out her hand and began ticking them off. “When I went to Maveth. When you went to Maveth. When I went to Hydra. When we quarreled for the months after I came back.”

 

“And the pod,” he added confidently. She shook her head.

 

“That’s number six.”

 

“Jemma, what was worse than being betrayed by our friend, left to die, and stranded in the middle of the ocean after you dragged my sorry carcass up from the bottom of the sea?”

 

When he put it like that, it deserved a higher place. She didn’t rank by mere danger, though. She bit her lip, not sure now if he would accept her answer. “Not the pod. It was the nine days after—not even all of them, though. Just the parts they put me out of the room and I couldn’t hold your hand and hear your heartbeat.”

 

The look he gave her then had become unfamiliar in the six months since they stopped wasting time, but she still remembered it well: his mouth hanging open, his breathing quickening, his eyes wondering. Trans-dimensional embracing was impossible, which he knew as well as she. It didn’t matter. They didn’t need it to know it. Wrapping her arms tightly around her middle, she met it and sent back hers that always followed: a set mouth and warm eyes and all the love her heart could hold.

 

“All right,” he said hoarsely, “then this is seven.”

 

She shook her head again. “Seven is when we had to sit on opposite sides of the room for Vaughn’s history lectures and couldn’t pass notes for the whole rotten semester.”

 

“Simmons,” he said, “I don’t think you understand the bit where I’m in a different dimension.”

 

“Yes, but—” Her hair fell in front of her face as she glanced down at her hands, but she brushed it back when she looked up with a smile. He couldn’t miss a single thing about this. “But at least we’re still together. That’s the really important thing, Fitz.”

 

And it was. So many things could have happened to him—or to her, to be perfectly honest—and yes, this wasn’t an ideal situation, but there was still him and her and a lab, and the rest would sort itself out. She knew it would.

 

A slow smile spread across his face. “If I had known all I had to do to spend time with my girlfriend was get transported to a different dimension, I’d have done it ages ago.”

 

She laughed aloud, covering it quickly with her gloved hands in case somebody walked by and found it odd for her to be so amused by her samples. “Stay with me, Fitz. Help me finish my project here and then I’ll raise hell until they let me go home, and then we’ll fix this the way we always do.”

 

He shoved his hands casually into his pockets and shrugged, the picture of nonchalance. Only his eyes, still the only shade of blue she’d ever loved, told her otherwise. “Oh, well. I guess I’ve got nowhere better to go. And you’re only my favorite person in the world, so. Just be sure to keep your hands off me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Do I think this will happen? No. But it might be nice if it did.


End file.
